"didn't" with ?

[Wilson Gray]

The *spread* of the use of glottal stop in BE is certainly an
innovation that, IMO, is driven by the popularity of hip-hop and rap.
Until the beginning of that craze, I had heard only a single black
person speak with a glottal stop, an old Army buddy whom I met in 1961
and with whom I'm still in contact. He's from Fuquay Springs in Wake
County, NC. My stepmother is also from Wake County, NC, but neither
she nor anybody else that I've met from that area uses glottal stop.
(However, it's one of her brothers that I heard pronounce "Japan" as
"JAY-pan.") My glottal-stop-using ace boon was, once upon a time, sui
generis in my experience of BE. It's too bad that things didn't stay
that way.

Oh, well. What can you do?

-Wilson

On 10/9/06, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "didn't" with ?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 2:47 PM -0400 10/9/06, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
> >On 10/9/06, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >>Did we already have a discussion at some point about the
> >>(innovative?) dialectal pronunciation of what we might call 'the
> >>"didn't" of incredulity' as in "No, you (she, they) dI?In" (with
> >>falling tone)?  I hear it on SNL or MadTV, but not in real life, and
> >>it seems to express incredulity/amazement/scorn/..., along the lines
> >>of 'I'm surprised that you (she, they) did'.  Anyone have a rough and
> >>ready characterization of the phonetics and/or sociolinguistics of
> >>this marker?
> >
> >There was discussion in Nov. 2004 under the subject line, "'di?nt'
> >(with glottal stop)".
> >
> >http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0411c&L=ads-l&I=-3#4
> >
> Yup, that's the one.  Thanks, Ben.
>
> Larry
>
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